Night had fallen.
And yet it was always night in this dark and evil place, this secret, hidden place where even the flickering candlelight could not quite penetrate the heavy blackness. Shadows slid across damp, crumbling walls, oozing into corners and crevices, slithering silently over the blank, staring faces of broken statuary.
And the human figures, too, resembled statues—strange, soulless reminders of death and decay—as they knelt upon the ground, their faces bent in supplication.
An ominous chanting rose and fell around them . . . rose and fell . . . echoing on and on through the chamber.
Luke kept himself apart from the others. Apart and well ahead of the rest, an imposing figure even upon his knees, his eyes and senses keenly alert. He was large and powerfully built, with wide nostrils and narrowly angled reptilian eyes, thick lips, and a jutting brow. To an innocent onlooker, he might have passed for a young man in his twenties—yet the truth was, Luke was much, much older than that. His clothes reflected long-ago and long-forgotten eras, but spoke definitively of none.
The chanting became louder now . . . more intense. Luke gazed for a long while into the calm, thick surface of a dark red pool. A pool of blood.
“The sleeper will awaken,” Luke pronounced.
His voice was deep and resonant; his face was a vampire’s face. His breath smelled of graveyards and rotting corpses.
“The sleeper will awaken,” Luke said again. “And the world will bleed.”
Slowly he dipped his finger in the blood.
“Amen.”
And as the candles guttered wildly, the dismal ruins around him were illuminated, but only for one brief instant—the ruins of a church long buried beneath the earth. Stanchions and arches leaned at broken angles, sheeted rock pushed in from all sides. The shiny pool of blood spread itself thickly over what once had been an altar.
The chanting swelled in volume.
It filled the chamber with devotion and despair, trembling every shadow, every heartbeat.
And the faithful waited.